Stupid Simple Mac Tips #63 – Slack – Are you Committing This Annoying Posting Habit?
This week continue this month’s focus on Slack – the popular messaging platform for businesses in use by ourselves and thousands of law firms.
Normally, these Stupid Simple Mac Tips focus on key, simple features you should START using to increase your efficiency.
I’ve flipped it around during January and will share what to stop 🛑✋🏼 doing with Slack (to make you more efficient and strengthen collaboration between your team).
The faux-pas this week is breaking up your multi-line posts into multiple messages.
Why does this matter?
Glad you asked.
If you are sending a paragraph or a long statement about a topic, hitting enter at the end of each line does not create a new space, but sends your message.
All your lines come in as individual posts.
As a result, this increases interruptions = reduced efficiency.
In addition, you cannot reply directly to the main post because the message is broken up into multiple one-liners (even if visually it appears to be together).
This impedes well-organized conversations or follow up posts = reduced efficiency.
When used properly, Slack adds a significant tool to improve the efficiency and collaboration of your entire team.
Make sure your entire team reads this tip to make conversations easier to follow, move forward and refer back to when needed.
So what is the issue, exactly?
Many people do not even realize that when you hit the “enter” or “return” button at the end of a line of text in Slack, it sends that message.
This can get a bit frustrating for not only you, but the person you are sending a message to. So, how can you have nice looking message without sending each line separately?
When you want a line break in your message better, simply hold SHIFT and press RETURN or ENTER. That’s it!
Now your recipient will receive a nicely formatted message, easy to read and understand, and as a single post, making it easy to respond to in the thread, nesting a conversation together logically.
Have these tips helped make Slack more effective? Come back for one more thing I’ll suggest you STOP doing next week!
Do you have a favorite Slack tip others (and maybe I) would benefit from? Send me an email with your tip and I’ll share it on our Facebook page.
